First Do No Harm

“First Do No Harm delivers plenty of suspenseful action, upping the ante every chapter in a race to the end.”

Anesthesiologist Dr. Blair Moreland is an asshole. Pompous, rude, mean, and condescending, he has few friends in Colorado Springs General Hospital where he works. But what makes him most dangerous is that he’s an addict. And now he’s been syphoning off fentanyl from the IV bags for pain patients, leaving many begging and crying for relief, sometimes during surgery, while he shoots up in a back room.

Then Dr. Moreland comes up with a bright idea: manufacture the fentanyl in powder form so he can control the drug flow in Colorado Springs and make a lot of money. He’ll not stand for anyone to get in his way.

Enter Lt. Joe Kenda, author and star of the Joe Kenda: Homicide Hunter show streaming from Investigation Discovery, and Lee Wilson, his partner. Both are homicide detectives for Colorado Springs PD. A string of overdoses has been linked been linked to “Mexican brown” heroin that is laced with something that is killing its users. That doesn’t mean that Kenda and Wilson, as homicide detectives, should get involved, as heroin users die with some frequency in any city. As Kenda writes, “Dying of an overdose is an occupational hazard for drug addicts. For Wilson and me to get involved, there had to be at least some evidence that there was murderous intent, or at least murderous negligence in the preparation and sale of the heroin that killed them.”

Within a few weeks, there are three prominent overdoses. First to go is Buck Medina, a local hero who had evidently fallen off the wagon. Next is Curtis Whitford, a privileged ski bum from the wealthy part of town. And then Alfonso Peres, who was an airman at the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD complex, which the army runs in a vast underground cavern that was built to withstand a nuclear event. Then, a few weeks later, a local evangelist preacher dies of a suspicious overdose. The victims are from vastly different backgrounds, so did they all share the same dealer? Or had their dealers gotten their supply from the same source? Or is there a dealer out there purposefully killing the addicts?

Then the Hinojosa family, cartel runners from Mexico, get word that their Mexican brown is being laced with a potent new drug. Drug deaths are bad business. The local familia is now searching for the culprit. The perpetrator will pay with their life, but not before revealing their source. In the meantime, prostitute Aurora Santiago, who is suspected to have sold some laced heroin to one of the victims, is murdered and hung from a freeway overpass to serve as an example to other dealers who might be getting ideas about adding the new drug to their supplies. Now that there’s a murder, Kenda and Wilson accelerate their investigation.

Lula Lopez, who used to work in the NORAD Cheyenne Mountain complex but was quietly let go because of using or supplying drugs to army personnel, now works as a counselor at a local rehab center. Dr. Moreland happens to volunteer as a counselor there as well. It’s a place where Lopez wants to get access to addicts so she can sell them her heroin on the side. Dr. Moreland has the same idea, but with his fentanyl. When the two discover each other’s nefarious intentions, they team up. Dr. Moreland will sell her the fentanyl to lace her heroin with so she can make more profit. And he will make money by supplying dealers all over town and in other environs with the fentanyl they will soon come to crave. But the drug is 100 times more potent than morphine, and only a microgram or so, the amount that will fit on the tip of a sharpened pencil, could be more than enough to kill. But Lula doesn’t realize how small that is. And her addicts are dying.

Dr. Moreland hires a young man just released from the rehab center to run the fentanyl lab he is setting up in the woods behind a cabin he purchases just for that purpose. Lester Sharp, who never completed his chemistry PhD, is the perfect little worker. He’ll get free rent, work solo, get paid more than he ever dreamed of, and will get to do so in a state-of-the-art chem lab. He’ll stay at the lab in the back of the cabin full-time to first learn the method to prepare the fentanyl powder, and then to actually create vats of it for Moreland to sell. It’s the perfect setup. Or is it?

When autopsy reports reveal that those who overdosed did so because the heroin was laced with fentanyl, Kenda and Wilson pick up the pace. They have to find the source. When a detective from the county where Moreland’s lab is based in calls Kenda and reports that his elderly father and 10-year-old son have been killed by exposure to fentanyl (Lester had left vats of it outside the lab to dry, and the old man and his grandson had stumbled upon it), the detectives are ready to move.   

This fast-paced novel is all plot. We race from scene to scene, breathless, to see what in the heck is going to happen next. The good guys are good all the way through, and the bad guys are all bad and that’s it; so the characters are a little wooden. And the writing is nowhere in the vicinity of literary, but people don’t buy police procedurals for their prose. They buy them for the action. And First Do No Harm delivers plenty of suspenseful action, upping the ante every chapter in a race to the end.

As Kenda writes in his Postscript, at first Fentanyl was first used to cut heroin, “now it is often sold online disguised as prescription pills like Oxycontin, Percocet, and Xanax. People who think they are buying their prescription drugs on the cheap are dying from taking those pills,” and even more street drugs are laced with fentanyl, contributing to the nationwide death count from opioids. “No wonder the Commonwealth of Virginia has labelled fentanyl ‘a weapon of terrorism.’”

So while the novel is fiction, Kenda has painted a true portrait of the dangers of fentanyl. We can expect addicts and other recreational drug users to continue to die from its effects. Even when prescribed by a physician, addiction to fentanyl kills, as we have observed in the plethora of celebrity deaths tied to fentanyl use. As Kenda writes, “Hundreds of thousands have died from fentanyl abuse, but when there are such profits to be made, criminals care nothing of the human suffering they create. As you may have heard me say before, when it comes to man’s inhumanity to man, truth is always stranger—and more disturbing—than fiction.”